User friendly
We call it Classical Music. It may be Renaissance Music, Baroque Music, Contemporary Music, or Romantic Music—but we call it Classical Music. And Classical Music has a bad rap. It’s perceived by many as pricey, snooty, exclusionary, and snobbish. We could say that Classical Music has earned its bad rap, and I think we might be the culprits.
In the early 1970s I was a teenager learning to be serious about music. Around the corner from our house was a Congregational church with a new Fisk organ where I had my lessons on Friday afternoons and where I practiced most days after school. My father was rector of the Episcopal church (home of another Fisk organ). His invariable routine was to close himself in the living room on Saturday night with a card table and a black manual typewriter. He tuned the KLH hi-fi to WCRB, Boston’s only commercial Classical Music station, and wrote the sermon for the next morning, accompanied by the live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
For decades, Richard L. Kaye was the announcer for those broadcasts. I listened to many of them on my own (far superior) hi-fi gear in my upstairs bedroom and became devoted to the show that followed the broadcasts, WCRB Saturday Night. Also hosted by Richard L. Kaye, this was an erudite mix of music and humor that I think may have had something to do with my musical formation. Richard Kaye was a connoisseur of music-based humor. He played parodies by Spike Milligan and Allen Sherman. He was the first in Boston to broadcast Monty Python’s Flying Circus, even before they “went video.” Victor Borge was a perennial favorite, and I know that I heard the King’s Singers first on his program, giving London weather forecasts to Anglican chant.
I’m afraid I was a pretty serious teenager, very sure (way too sure) of myself when it came to the Praeludia of Buxtehude, dead sure that an organ recital should open with a suite from Classic (read Baroque) French music, and horrified if some unwitting devotée would presume to applaud after the Prelude and before the Fugue during one of my (perhaps too frequent) recitals.
Richard Kaye ran semi-annual fund raisers on WCRB for the Boston Symphony dubbed Boston Symphony Marathons. His obituary in The Boston Globe (December 23, 2006) credited him with raising more than three million dollars for the orchestra. I loved listening to the marathons because they were peppered with interviews of the orchestra’s players, conductors, and guest artists—and I was fascinated to hear those luminaries talk about their musical lives. One marathon included a contest for musical puns with prizes that included concert tickets, back stage visits, tee-shirts, the whole nine yards. My entry: “Of Korsakov only between movements.” No tee-shirt.
While I thought that was the height of musical humor, it was also an early sign of musical snobbism. I was intimately familiar with the polite shuffle heard over the radio as patrons shifted themselves in their seats and gave the little “symphony coughs” that they had been stifling for the previous eight minutes. And I knew personally the agony of sitting in the hall with my glottis clamped shut, wishing that for once they wouldn’t take all the repeats. It was unthinkable to me to be the boor who dared interrupt the musicians’ flow.
Several years after graduating from Oberlin, I had an impromptu reunion with a conservatory classmate who had become principal trumpet for a regional symphony orchestra. He told of an evening when during a performance there was a commotion in the balcony and the (unpopular) music director stopped the orchestra and whirled around indignantly to berate the audience. The heart-attack victim survived—the conductor didn’t.
§
applaud v – intr. 1. To express approval, especially by the clapping of hands. 2. To commend highly; praise. (from Latin, applaudere, to strike upon, clap.)1
The ancient Romans were early developers of organized applause. There was a hierarchy of expression, starting with the snapping of fingers, moving through rhythmic clapping of hands, to the hair-raising waving of the flaps of togas. The emperor Aurelian suggested substituting the waving of handkerchiefs for the flapping of togas, certainly more appropriate for organ recitals and other events of immense dignity.2 Although as I write, I’m imagining a hilarious scene involving togas that might well take place at an organists’ convention.
Pittsburgh sportscaster Myron Cope (perhaps unwittingly) took up the tradition instituted by Aurelian when he invited fans of the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers to bring yellow dish towels to the stadium for use as applause props during a championship game with the Baltimore Colts in 1975. Nearly 30 years later, Steelers’ fans are famous for the yellow Terrible Towel, available officially in various forms from the Pittsburgh Steelers at <http://news.steelers.com/catalog/
TerribleStuff/> for about $7.95, or from Amazon.com (new for $5.79, used for $.99). (I suppose you’d choose a used one to take to a concert of which you didn’t expect much.)
To help with your decision of which to buy, I offer words from Aurelian’s applauded successor, Myron Cope himself:
The Terrible Towel is not an instrument of witchcraft . . . It is not a hex upon the enemy. THE TOWEL is a positive force that lifts the Steelers to magnificent heights—and poses mysterious difficulties for the Steelers’ opponents only if need be. Many have told me that THE TERRIBLE TOWEL brought them good fortune, but I can’t guarantee that sort of thing because the Steelers, after all, are THE TOWEL’S primary concern. Still, at the least, the symbol of THE TERRIBLE TOWEL will serve as a memento of your having been part of the Steelers’ Dynasty and if it causes good things to happen to you, so much the better.
I realize that Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium (replaced in 2001 by Heinz Field Stadium) is a long way from Symphony Hall in Boston, and that the events typically presented in those venues bear little in common. But I wonder how much good the stuffy applause etiquette practiced at serious concerts does for the future of good music. Edward Elgar’s First Symphony was premiered in Manchester, England in 1908. His wife Caroline wrote, “after 3rd movement E. had to go up on platform & whole Orch. & nos. of audience stood up—Wonderful scene.” It’s hard to picture that scene today. Who would give the “first clap” after the first movement? One concert musician wrote that she liked it when a few uninitiated people started to clap between movements because it meant there was someone new there.
I read an interesting article by Henry Fogel in the online Arts Journal <http://www.artsjournal.com/onthe
record/2007/03/the_applause_issue.html>. (That’s where I got the quote from Elgar’s wife.) The article ended with a lengthy set of blogging responses. One was from a woman named Ashley, who had taken her ten-year-old son to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She wrote,
Everyone had their nose so far up in the air that they could barely see my son walking in front of them—the last straw was when several people on the lower level began applauding so my son followed suit and the people around us were FREAKING OUT, making rude comments, and shushing them . . . my son and I felt like idiots (and I hadn’t even clapped). We will NEVER attend again . . . I have enough stress in my life—I don’t need to be made to feel like a 2nd class citizen and a complete idiot while trying to enjoy some culture with my son . . .
Are we alienating our future public by trying to prove how much we know? After all, you really show that you know the piece well if you dare applaud loudly the second a piece is finished. Conversely, when you’re hearing a world premiere performance, are you going to be the first to applaud? The audience sits nervously, glancing around, clappers poised, not daring to budge until the conductor asks the orchestra to stand . . .
Concert pianist Emmanuel Ax is challenging tradition. He has written in his website blog <www.emanuelax.word press.com/2008>: “All of us love applause, and so we should—it means that the listener LIKES us! So we should welcome applause whenever it comes. And yet, we seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.” I was made aware of this “Ax of evil” in an article by Sam Allis in The Boston Sunday Globe, January 16, 2009, “Make a joyful noise; Classical audiences should loosen up and applaud at will.” He begins, “Manny Ax is my new hero.” (This is a local joke on Manny Ramirez, of late the left fielder of the Boston Red Sox, and an extraordinary hitter, who is perhaps best known for his arrogance and poor attitude on the field.)
In his article, Sam Allis cites Mark Volpe, distinguished general manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra:
Mark Volpe . . . agrees that there is a snobbism attached to the vow of silence, and stands firmly with Ax on the applause issue. Volpe also recognizes that an orchestra’s goal, particularly in these brutal economic times, must be to expand the classical audience, not terrify newcomers out of the hall.
§
They loved me in Milan, they loved me in New York
There may be no more formal concert venue in America than the Metropolitan Opera of New York. If you think it takes a lot of money to run a symphony orchestra or a pipe organ, consider the Met. It has a symphony orchestra plus a chorus, a battery of high-end singers, a dance company, countless stagehands, designers, choreographers, storage facilities, transportation departments, and lighting technicians. The patrons of the Met are assumed to be the wealthy and elite. But—the Met offers 15-dollar seats, admittedly not very close to the stage, and if you hear something you like you can applaud. In fact, it’s customary for the audience to applaud vigorously after a well-sung aria.
On Monday, April 21, 2008, a singer sang an encore of an aria during a Met performance for the first time since 1994. Tenor Juan Diego Flórez was singing the role of Tonio in Donizetti’s romp, La Fille du Régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment). The highpoint of this role is the aria, Ah! mes amis, in which Tonio shares that he has joined the regiment as a soldier because of his love for Marie (the title role), sung magnificently and hilariously by Natalie Dessay. (We saw the production on HD simulcast the following Saturday, and I’ve got to tell you, she’s a virtuoso with a steam iron, an absolute laugh-riot. Plus, she can sing.)
The tenor’s aria includes nine high Cs, eight of which are reached by octave leaps, allegro. Luciano Pavarotti’s fame was established in large part by this aria, earning him the sobriquet, King of the High Cs. (Aaargh!) Two days after the encore, Robert Siegel of National Public Radio interviewed Peter Gelb, the innovative general manager of the Metropolitan Opera on All Things Considered. Mr. Gelb told us that Juan Diego Flórez had recently sung an encore of that aria at La Scala in Milan, and when the tenor arrived in New York for rehearsals with the Met, Mr. Gelb asked him if he would like to plan for an encore if the audience response warranted one. Mr. Gelb has a box seat in the Metropolitan Opera House with a hotline to the stage manager. Forty-five seconds into the roar of applause following the aria, Mr. Gelb made the call, the stage manager pressed a button to turn on a light on conductor James Levine’s music stand, the conductor and the singer made eye contact, and they were off to the races.
Siegel asked if, now that the ice has been broken again, more singers would be invited to sing encores. Gelb’s response, “We should only have that problem.”
You can hear Siegel’s eight-minute interview of Peter Gelb, including the high Cs, on <NPR.org>. Here’s the address—it’s worth it, tell them I sent you: <www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89884693>.
Why can’t we do that at an organ recital? If people like the music, let ‘em roar! In fact, plan your programs and present your performances so they feel invited.You’d rather have them come back, even if they don’t know the difference between the Prelude and the Fugue. (Are there really such people?)
